Unused sick leave

Q. How does the accumulation of sick leave factor into the overall retirement calculation? I plan on retiring in four years and will have accumulated more than a year’s worth of sick leave. I want to use it toward retirement. I will be 63 with 18 years of service as a civil servant. I’m retired military, as well.

A. After you meet the age and service requirements to retire, unused sick leave will be treated as if it was actual service and used in the computation of your annuity. For example, if you had 2,087 hours of unused sick leave, your annuity would be based on 19 years instead of 18. As a result, your annuity would be 1 percent higher. Roughly speaking, every 174 hours of additional unused sick leave would further increase your annuity by one-twelfth of 1 percent.

Your unused hours of sick leave hours will be treated as actual service, with every hour being equivalent to an hour you worked. The new total will be used in the standard annuity formula: .01 X your high-3 X your years and full months of service

OK thank you. Wife and I talked to some one in Postal HR about 3 mos. ago . Told him we needed an idea of what to expect from retirement he said he would forward her info on to OPM ?? but it would take min. of 6mos. for them to get back to us. Thats why I’m trying to use your site to do our own homework . Thank you Frank McCleary